


still, i think i'm doing fine

by zeitgeistofnow



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Fluff, M/M, Reunions, Slice of Life, also they're adults, and have matured past their angsty teens/twenties, asjkf we love the freedom fighters as a band, who pay Taxes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26724388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeitgeistofnow/pseuds/zeitgeistofnow
Summary: jet stands in the middle of the airport, letting the other travelers with their suitcases and duffel bags and trains of wailing children move around him like water around a rock. the airport feels like an otherworld, like a pause from his usual life. people don’t usually recognize him in airports- mullet hidden under a beanie, wearing a sweatshirt for a band he’d loved in college, one whose record sales the freedom fighters outpaced years ago. he’s just another nobody in a building beyond time.zuko would call it a liminal space. zuko likes words like that, fancy education-signaling things that make him sound smart. sometimes jet likes listening to him explain things. sometimes he doesn’t. he usually lets zuko know if he’s in the kind of mood when it pisses him off and zuko sometimes stops explaining. he’ll stop more often these days, really, and it bothers jet less often too.
Relationships: Jet/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 36
Kudos: 126





	still, i think i'm doing fine

**Author's Note:**

> rated teen for non-sexual nudity and also discussion of math and numbers and money

Jet stands in the middle of the airport, letting the other travellers with their suitcases and duffle bags and trains of wailing children move around him like water around a rock. The airport feels like an otherworld, like a pause from his usual life. People don’t usually recognise him in airports- mullet hidden under a beanie, wearing a sweatshirt for a band he’d loved in college, one whose record sales the Freedom Fighters outpaced years ago. He’s just another nobody in a building beyond time.

Zuko would call it a liminal space. Zuko likes words like that, fancy education-signaling things that make him sound smart. Sometimes Jet likes listening to him explain things. Sometimes he doesn’t. He usually lets Zuko know if he’s in the kind of mood when it pisses him off and Zuko sometimes stops explaining. He’ll stop more often these days, really, and it bothers Jet less often too.

Finally, Jet takes a breath and plunges into the stream, weaving between all the people in all the hallways. He buys a gyro from a place near the door and instantly regrets it as tzatziki sauce spills out of the aluminum foil and coats the tips of his fingers. Still, he manages to wolf it down with one hand, the other typing out an Uber. 

In airports, he feels how he used to feel. Just another kid- even though he’s not a kid anymore, he’s a thirty year old with a partner whose upper level job was scored through nepotism- waiting for a blue 2011 Prius with bits of lamb between his teeth. 

A car pulls up in front of him, bright blue and dinged in a few places. Jet pulls open the back door and slides into the seat, tugging his suitcase with him. The wheels get turned around and caught on the edge of the sidewalk, but a good yank pulls it into the seat next to him. 

“Where to?” his driver asks, meeting Jet’s eyes in the rearview. 

Jet recites Zuko’s address, even though it’s in one of those fancy apartments downtown that he could probably just mention by name. He wants to feel like no one for a few more minutes though. Just a few more.

The driver whistles, low in his throat. “Fancy place, huh.”

Jet sighs and flicks open his messages app. “Yep.”

_ on my way,  _ he texts Zuko, 😘.

_ Jet sits on a stool in the middle of a stage, the rest of the Freedom Fighters arranged around him. Smellerbee sits on the edge of the stage, which she can do since it’s such a small venue. A secret show, one of those PR things Jet would have thought was a dumb press grab when he was younger. Now he just likes them, likes the casual atmosphere. He’s not so famous that the shows get leaked and flooded halfway through, and he hopes he never is. He likes this.  _

_ The rest of the band starts to play, a swell of instruments rising behind him. Jet wraps one hand around the mic stand. _

_ “Men reading fashion magazines,” he starts, “oh what a world it seems we live in…” _

By the time the Lyft driver drops Jet in front of Zuko’s apartment, Jet and Zuko have had an entire conversation that consisted of _ i missed u, how was your flight, cant wait to see you  _ and  _ i bought a dog  _ and  _ you did NOT  _ and  _ yes i did  _ and  _ call me right now  _ and a short phone call that started with Zuko furious and Jet half-laughing and ended with both of them talking about real estate prices in the city. 

Jet shuffles out of the car and takes a moment to stand on the white-concrete sidewalk and stare up at the building. It’s gorgeous, brick and glass and Art Deco flourishes that add a quiet elegance to what would otherwise be a brutalist structure. It reminds Jet of Zuko. Blunt and sharp except for all the places where he’s modeled with so much elegance that it hurts. And expensive.

Mostly expensive, Jet decides as he rides the elevator up to the fifth floor. 

The elevator is one of those fancy ones where the interior is completely mirrors- Jet used to think it was weird, disorienting in a way he couldn’t understand. Now he’s been in enough expensive hotels to barely blink at any variation on gold-mirrored-silver elevators. 

He does an awkward half-shuffle to get his key ring out of his pocket, keeping his suitcase in place with an elbow and straightening his hair in the mirror with his free hand. It looks messy, now that he’s taken off the beanie he was wearing, hair poking up in all directions from the awkward way he’d slept on the plane. 

Zuko will have a warm shower and some absurdly soft towels for him. Jet will have to use Zuko’s hair products, because even after eight years he won’t buy Jet’s three-in-one shampoo, but that’s okay.

The elevator dings happily and slides open. Jet spins the apartment keys around on his index finger as he walks down the hallway. They clink against each other, then click into the lock, then Zuko’s apartment door is open and Jet is striding inside, leaving his luggage to spin off into the kitchen. 

_ “Straight men,” Jet continues, almost humming into the microphone. “Oh, what a world we live in…” _

_ Longshot plays a few low notes, eyes on Jet from the back of the stage. Smellerbee echoes the notes and Jet takes the moment to take a breath. “Why am I always on a plane or a fast train?” _

_ He’s going to Zuko’s place tonight, taking a five hour flight so that he can land just in time for Zuko’s evening routine. It’ll be nice, definitely worth the trip, certainly worth the money, which doesn’t even seem to have real meaning anymore. Zuko will apologize for not having gone to any of Jet’s shows, as always, and Jet will know he doesn’t mean it. He’ll know that the shows bring back too many chaotic-bad memories of the two of them, seven, six, five years ago, blood on their teeth and the world at their feet and far, far too many feelings about both those things. _

_ Jet will understand and play a few songs for Zuko to make up for it. _

_ “Oh, what a world my parents gave me…” He wrote this song about Zuko, a few years ago. He played it for his partner right after he wrote it, and Zuko had looked at him with a quietly strange look, like he saw through the references to Zuko and saw the references to Jet hidden in the lyrics.  _

_ It’s easy to say it’s a tongue-in-cheek love song for an upper-class, pessimistic boyfriend. Harder to say that Jet isn’t that different from Zuko.  _

“I’m home, honey,” Jet calls, voice dripping with joking sweetness. Zuko is curled on his too-big L-shaped couch. The couch is stiff and uncomfortable and Zuko’s collected every pillow in his house in the corner of it to make up for that. His brand-new Surface laptop sits in his lap and papers covered in numbers Jet could never pretend to understand sit scattered on the coffee table and couch around him. Jet has to give Zuko that; he might not have earned his position, but he tries so hard to deserve it. 

Jet sits right in the middle of the sheets, feeling the slight give of the linen couch cushions and the crinkling of papers.

Zuko shoots him an exasperated look.

“What, no hello?” Jet asks, doing his best to settle into a comfortable position. 

“I’ll play sweet boyfriend when you stop immediately making my life harder as soon as you walk into the room,” Zuko says, but there’s no heat behind it. He tugs a few sheets out from under Jet and Jet lifts himself slightly to make the task easier. “How was your show last night?” He does that cute thing where he bounces a half-dozen papers against his thigh to make them line up with each other, then places them gently on the coffee table and shuts his laptop with a click.

Jet stretches and tosses his legs over Zuko’s lap, now that there’s not a computer that cost more than his childhood home on it. “Chill,” he says, “small venue, Smellerbee was in a good mood.” He eyes Zuko, sees the happy smile spread across his face just from seeing Jet, and decides he can afford to be a little bit of a bastard this evening. “Missed you, though,” he says, and Zuko’s smile dips into an apologetic look. 

He still doesn’t look like it’s ruined his evening, though, so Jet gives himself a point in the ‘Jet knows how to have a human conversation’ competition. 

“Sorry I couldn’t be there,” Zuko says, looking genuinely remorseful even as this is the thousandth time they’ve had this exact conversation, “but my dad would be pissed if I was flying cross-country for all your shows.”

“You would’ve liked the bartender,” Jet says, then waves a hand airily. “Doesn’t matter, and why come all the way to some crowded show when you have your own lead singer, right here in your living room?” He smoothly flips around on the couch so that his head is resting on Zuko’s lap instead of his feet and air guitars so that Zuko will smile again. 

He does, lips quirking at the corners and showing off perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. “Why indeed,” he says, and they both know Zuko knows  _ exactly  _ why Jet wants Zuko at his shows. For someone to share the feeling of post-show exhilaration with, someone to look at in the audience when it all gets a little overwhelming, someone who will understand the inside jokes even Smellerbee doesn’t know. 

Still, Zuko has his office job and Jet has his wanderlust, and they don’t mix-and-match as well as they both wish. A weekend or two a month is enough. 

Zuko leans down and presses a gentle kiss to Jet’s cheekbone, right below his eye. The kind of softness a younger Jet couldn’t imagine at all, let alone directed at him. Jet hums happily and Zuko wrinkles his nose. God, he’s beautiful.

“You smell,” Zuko says, flicking Jet’s forehead with two perfectly manicured fingers, “like airplanes and cigarette smoke.”

_ “Always traveling, but not in love,” Jet continues, eyes flittering across the dozens of faces watching him. He’s considered changing this part of the song a thousand times, the lyrics invoking a younger Jet who didn’t think Zuko loved him in the fierce way Zuko approaches everything he loves and a younger Jet who didn’t think  _ he  _ could ever really love anything, period.  _

_ He’s since reconsidered, started noticing the warm way Zuko’s eyes crinkle when Jet walks into the room, the way Jet’s heart sings butterflies when Zuko wakes him in the morning with a kiss and a sleepy offer of probably-burnt coffee.  _

_ It’s just… it was a strange transition from the loud, angry way their relationship started, passionate and jolting, when Jet could tell how much Zuko loved him by how shrill his voice got when the fought, to wherever they are now where Jet only teases Zuko as far as the other man’s smile will go. It was weird, too, feeling his own anger simmer away into something less volatile and watching Zuko’s do the same.  _

_ “Still, I think I’m doing fine,” he sings, and Smellerbee flashes him a grin from the edge of the stage, hair hanging in her face.  _

_ He  _ is _ doing fine, and it feels strange and golden. _

Zuko washes Jet’s hair, nails scrubbing experimentally at where Jet’s sides are newly shaved and fingers carding through twisted and shampoo-frothed hair at the nape of his neck. Zuko’s shampoo smells like almonds, and Zuko says, with a fondly exasperated tint to his voice, that that’s because his shampoo is almond scented. 

His shower is fancy and Jet thinks it’s newly installed, because it has a fancy little thing that lets him set the temperature of the water down to the degree and he doesn’t remember trying to figure out how it worked the last time he was here.

Jet leans back against Zuko, faintly almond-scented steam rising around them, and Zuko rests his head on Jet’s shoulder. The shampoo still in Jet’s hair crackles at the touch. 

“Your shampoo smells so much better than mine,” Jet murmurs, and Zuko laughs, swiping water out of his face.

“That’s because the shit you buy has  _ bad  _ as its scent. Right there on the bottle.” 

Zuko shoves Jet under the shower, as if to punctuate his insult of Jet’s shampoo-conditioner-body-wash, and once Jet manages to swipe away the watery shampoo now streaming down his face enough to open his eyes, he sputters his way through a rebuttal that he’s pretty sure is mostly incoherent, but definitely ends with “you’re so  _ mean.” _

Zuko finger-combs the rest of the shampoo out of Jet’s hair and presses another kiss to the top of his back. “You love it, though,” he says, and Jet smiles at the tile in front of him.

“Maybe I do,” he says. 

_ “Wouldn't it be a lovely headline?” Jet is holding the microphone now, twisting the cord around his fingers just like his managers always say he shouldn’t do, because it messes with the sound imperceptibly and distracts from what they like to call, sarcasm dripping from their tongues, Jet’s  _ beautiful face _. “Life is,” and here he hums, the line break calling for a breath and a blink and a quiet crescendo of his band, “beautiful, on the New York Times,” and doesn’t he wish. Doesn’t he wish things could always be the same kind of simple they are at home- at Zuko’s apartment- on a Friday evening eating stir fry with his Huffpost notifications turned off. _

_ Doesn’t he wish his life was as beautifully easy as in the stories he used to read, where people grow through epiphanies and love is always either easy and good or hard and awful.  _

Zuko cooks fried rice with leftover rice from the chinese place downtown, frozen vegetables from Trader Joes, and soy sauce from the asian grocery store that Jet knows he has to drive ten miles to get to. It smells good, and the crack of eggs against the counter sounds better than any concert Jet’s put on.

For Jet’s part, he sits on the marble island and watches Zuko’s elegant hands flit around his kitchen. Jet’s wrapped in a thick bathrobe. He keeps clothes here, t-shirts and leather jackets and flannels and ripped jeans, almost half a closet’s worth of clothes, plus the tattered band shirts and patterned boxer shirts he uses as pajamas, but Zuko’s bathrobe is warm from it’s spot above the head vent and it smells like rose detergent and Zuko in the early morning. 

Zuko stirs the rice and stifles a yawn. “Where’s my mini-concert?” He asks.

“Entitled trust fund kids,” Jet tsks, sprawling across the island so that he can get to where his guitar sits on the other side. Zuko doesn’t even try to argue, just hums the intro to one of Jet’s more recent songs and tosses a collection of eggshells into the tin bucket he uses for compost.

Jet strums experimentally at the guitar and Zuko retrieves a cutting board and a pepper from various places around his countertops. 

His voice feels scratchy now that he’s singing again, a tiredness to his voice that he hadn’t noticed in the cab or on the couch or in the shower but now makes his singing gravely. Zuko doesn’t seem to mind, though, mumble-singing the words quietly along with him. 

Awful concert etiquette, but Jet likes hearing Zuko sing. He doesn’t do it enough, a childhood of being subtly ridiculed for his joy making him self conscious, but when he does it feels like the clouds breaking apart to show the sun. 

Finally, the song ends and Zuko serves Jet fried rice in beautiful plates and silverware from CB2, but he looks quietly sad when Jet moves to put down the guitar, so he doesn’t, just takes bites of rice in between songs, carefully holding the fork over his guitar so that not a single grain falls onto the body of it. 

He plays song after song as Zuko slowly eats and once the other man stands, plate and fork in one hand, and walks over to the dishwasher to carefully fit them into the matching plates and forks already there, it’s almost like Jet has played his entire life out and that all that’s left is the pair of them.

Jet puts the guitar down on the counter next to him and it feels like he’s putting down the weight of the world and his lifeline and something that is nothing but a masterfully crafted piece of wood and wire and glue, all at the same time.

Zuko, graceful in silk pajama pants and one of Jet’s t-shirts, steps between Jet’s legs and presses their foreheads together.

“I can’t believe we got this far,” he says softly, and Jet knows it could refer to a thousand different things but he also recognizes it for what it is- Zuko loves him and he loves Zuko and they both can’t quite believe their love isn’t as destructive as they were always told it would always be. They can’t believe they managed to hold each other through the wreckage and come out on the other side.

“We were always going to,” Jet says, running his fingers up the hem of Zuko’s shirt and writing love confessions on his lower back. 

**Author's Note:**

> \- ajfkldsj this was supposed to be angsty and about how they're both angry people blah blah but then i was like u know what? they matured. they're allowed to be happy. so now it's this!! i love character growth with age it's probably my favorite :) i think canon ages jetko (and ESPECIALLY canon universe jetko) could be super toxic (just like any jetko, depending on how u characterize them) but i think they would be very cute together as adults.. once they go to therapy....  
> \- i love jet though he tries so hard  
> \- the song is "oh what a world" by rufus wainwright bc i was listening to it with my mom and something was like.. jet vibes.. so i went with it  
> \- you can find me on tumblr [@lazypigeon](https://lazypigeon.tumblr.com/)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [still, i think i'm doing fine [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29314053) by [Rionaa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rionaa/pseuds/Rionaa)




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